Jailbreaking The Amazon Echo Show

January 2, 2026 by No comments

As locked-down as the Amazon Echo Show line of devices are, they’re still just ARM-based Android devices, which makes repurposing it somewhat straightforward as long as what you want is another Android device.

Running Home Assistant on an Echo Show 8 with LineageOS. (Credit: Dammit Jeff, YouTube)
Running Home Assistant on an Echo Show 8 with LineageOS.

In this case, we’re talking about the first-generation Amazon Echo Show 8, which is a 2019-era device that got jailbroken back in November by [Rortiz2]. The process was then demonstrated in a video by [Dammit Jeff].

Currently only two devices are supported by this jailbreak, with the Echo Show 5 being the other one. If there’s enough interest, there doesn’t appear to be any technical reason at least for why this support couldn’t be extended to other devices. One major reason for jailbreaking is to put LineageOS on your Echo device courtesy of these Echo Show devices recently beginning to show advertisements, with no way to disable this.

The process of jailbreaking and installing the LineageOS ROM is somewhat long as usual, with plenty of points where you can make a tragic mistake. Fortunately it’s pretty simple as long as you follow the steps and afterwards you can even install the Google apps package if that’s your thing. Just mind the 1 GB RAM and 8 GB of storage on the Echo Show 8. In the case of [Jeff] he mostly replicated the home automation and entertainment features of Amazon’s FireOS with far less locked-down alternatives like Home Assistant.

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Hackaday Podcast Ep 351: Hackaday Goes To Chaos Communication Congress

January 2, 2026 by No comments

Elliot was of at Europe’s largest hacker convention: Chaos Communication Congress. He had an awesome time, saw more projects than you might think humanely possible, and got the flu. But he pulled through and put this audio tourbook for you.

So if you’ve never been to CCC, give it a listen!

In the far future, all the cool kids will be downloading MP3s of their favorite podcasts.

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Low-Cost, Portable Streaming Server

January 2, 2026 by 5 Comments

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi, we have easy access to extremely inexpensive machines running Linux that have all kinds of GPIO as well as various networking protocols. And as the platform has improved over the years, we’ve seen more demanding applications on them as well as applications that use an incredibly small amount of power. This project combines all of these improvements and implements a media streaming server on a Raspberry Pi that uses a tiny amount of energy, something that wouldn’t have been possible on the first generations of Pi.

Part of the reason this server uses such low power, coming in just around two watts, is that it’s based on the Pi Zero 2W. It’s running a piece of software called Mini-Pi Media Server which turns the Pi into a DLNA server capable of streaming media over the network, in this case WiFi. Samba is used to share files and Cockpit is onboard for easy web administration. In testing, the server was capable of streaming video to four different wireless devices simultaneously, all while plugged in to a small USB power supply.

For anyone who wants to try this out, the files for it as well as instructions are also available on a GitHub page. We could think of a number of ways that this would be useful over a more traditional streaming setup, specifically in situations where power demand must remain low such as on a long car trip or while off grid. We also don’t imagine the Pi will be doing much transcoding or streaming of 4K videos with its power and processing limitations, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to do so. For that you’d need something more powerful.

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The big white thing is is the CO2 exhaust bag.

Liquid CO2 For Grid Scale Energy Storage Isn’t Just Hot Air

January 2, 2026 by 81 Comments

There’s folk wisdom in just about every culture that teaches about renewable energy — things like “make hay while the sun shines”. But as an industrial culture, we want to make hay 24/7 and not be at the whims of some capricious weather god! Alas, renewable energy puts a crimp in that. Once again, energy supplies are slowly becoming tied to the sun and the wind.

Since “Make compute while the wind blows” doesn’t have a great ring to it, clearly our civilization needs to come up with some grid-scale storage. Over in Sardinia they’re testing an idea that sounds like hot air, but isn’t — because the working gas is CO2. 

The principle is simple: when power is available, carbon dioxide is compressed, cooled, and liquefied into pressure vessels as happens at millions of industrial facilities worldwide every day. When power is required, the compressed CO2 can be run through a turbine to generate sweet, sweet electricity. Since venting tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is kind of the thing we’re trying to avoid with this whole rigmarole, the greenhouse gas slash working fluid is stored in a giant bag. It sits, waiting for the next charge cycle, like the world’s heaviest and saddest dirigible. In the test project in Sardinia — backed by Google, amongst others — the gas bag holds 2000 tonnes and can produce 20 megawatts of power for up-to 10 hours.

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Print Your Own Standardized Wire Spool Storage

January 2, 2026 by 5 Comments

Hardware hackers tend to have loads of hookup wire, and that led [firstgizmo] to design a 3D printable wire and cable spool storage system. As a bonus, it’s Gridfinity-compatible!

The slot to capture loose ends is a nice touch, and the units can be assembled without external hardware.

There are a lot of little design touches we love. For example, we like the little notch into which the wire ends are held, which provides a way to secure the loose ends without any moving parts. Also, while at first glance these holders look like something that goes together with a few screws, they actually require no additional hardware and can be assembled entirely with printed parts. But should one wish to do so, [firstgizmo] has an alternate design that goes together with some M3 bolts instead.

Want to adjust something? The STEP files are included, which we always love to see because it makes modifications to the models so much more accessible. One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is that making engineering-type adjustments to STL files is awful, at best.

If there is one gotcha, it is that one must remove wire from their old spools and re-wind onto the new to use this system. However, [firstgizmo] tries to make that as easy as possible by providing two tools to make re-spooling easier: one for hand-cranking, and one for using a hand drill to do the work for you.

It’s a very thoughtful design, and as mentioned, can also be used with the Gridfinity system, which seems to open organizational floodgates in most people’s minds. Most of us are pinched for storage space, and small improvements in space-saving really, really add up.

Making The Fastest LEGO Technic Air-Powered Engine

January 1, 2026 by 1 Comment

Just because LEGO Technic is technically a toy doesn’t mean that you cannot do solid engineering with it, like building air-powered engines. After first building a simple air-powered piston engine, this time around [Jamie’s Brick Jams] sought to not only optimize the engine, but also build a clutch and something to power with said engine.

The four-piston design in radial configuration. (Credit: Jamie's Brick Jams, YouTube)
The four-piston design in radial configuration.

The piston head is one of the handful of 3D printed parts, with the new design featuring twin rubber o-rings as a seal instead of a single big one as in the old design. This incidentally matches the multiple seal rings on an internal combustion engine’s pistons, probably for similar blow-by related reasons. The air hose diameter was also increased from 2 to 3 mm to give the engine a larger volume of air to work with, which along with a new flywheel gave a lot more torque. Next the piston rod length was optimized.

The final radial 4-piston engine turns out to work pretty well, with the clutch engaging smoothly. This was used to drive a DIY generator that turned out to produce about 3 Watt of usable power in its final configuration at 6 V, though it’s admittedly a rather crude generator that could be further optimized. When trying a twin-piston configuration with the highest air pressure before air hoses began to pop off, it hit a dizzying 14,600 RPM.

These aren’t half bad results for some LEGO Technic together with some 3D printed bits, rubber o-rings and some lube.

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A tab-based terminal window is shown, with the label “brow6l – Hackaday.” The Hackaday website is visible in the upper part of the terminal screen, and in the lower part is a text display containing information about the website and interface information.

Terminal-Based Web Browsing With Modern Conveniences

January 1, 2026 by 9 Comments

Programmers hold to a wide spectrum of positions on software complexity, from the rare command-line purists to the much more common web app developers, and the two extremes rarely meet. One point of contact, though, might be [Jan Antos]’s Brow6el, which uses sixel graphics to display a fully graphical web browser within a terminal.

Behind the scenes, the Chromium Embedded Framework renders webpages headless, then Brow6el uses libsixel to convert the rendered output image to sixels, a simple kind of console-based graphics representation, which it then outputs to the terminal. It regularly re-renders the page to catch page updates and display them in real time, and it can send mouse or keyboard input back to the webpage. For more advanced work, it also has a JavaScript development console, and it’s possibly to manually inject scripts into rendered webpages, or inject them automatically using URL match patterns. Continue reading “Terminal-Based Web Browsing With Modern Conveniences” →